clean up the text

external/publication/phd-thesis-template/phd-thesis-template.md

@@ -15,31 +15,34 @@ A LaTeX template for PhD theses is available in GitLab at
 
 The repository includes several main items of interest:
 
-- In the `guidelines/` directory, there is a snapshot of official "Practical
-  information for Prospective PhD candidates" PDF, which contains the official
-  recommendations regarding the thesis formatting. It is suggested that you
-  read these carefully, as these are the _official_ recommendation.
-
-- The thesis template itself, present mainly in files `thesis.tex` and
+- In the `guidelines/` directory, there is **a snapshot of the official
+  "Practical information for Prospective PhD candidates" PDF**, which contains
+  the official recommendations regarding the thesis formatting. It is suggested
+  that you read these carefully, as these are the _official_ recommendations.
+  The snapshot is provided there only for convenience and its version is not
+  necessarily authoritative -- ask your supervisor and committee if there is a
+  newer version.
+
+- **The thesis template itself**, present mainly in files `thesis.tex` and
   `macros.tex`. You are supposed to fill in your credentials into
   `metadata.tex`, and then continue editing the other files (`summary.tex`,
   `intro.tex`, ...) with the usual LaTeX thesis contents.
 
-- A simple build system for producing a PDF with the typeset thesis. If you
+- **A simple build system for producing a PDF with the typeset thesis**. If you
   develop in GitLab or on GitHub, the thesis repository is configured so that
-  it should automatically run a CI and produce a PDF artifact with the thesis
-  each time you push a new commit. To build the thesis yourself on your
+  it will automatically run a CI and produce a PDF artifact with the thesis
+  whenever you push a new commit. To build the thesis yourself on your
   computer, you should be able to do it using any standard, sufficiently recent
   TeXlive distribution, or alternatively using Docker. The documentation in the
-  repository contains several hints on how to do that.
+  repository `README.md` contains several hints on how to do that.
 
 - The default thesis text (that you are supposed to erase and rewrite) contains
-  some minor hints about the structure of the thesis (mainly the headings of
-  the 4 main chapters), and various collected advice and demos of how to nicely
-  typeset the usual material that is found in the theses, such as citations,
-  figures, tables, mathematics, cross-references, appendices, etc. Various
-  other things (table of contents, section numbering, ...) work correctly by
-  default.
+  **some minor hints about the structure of the thesis** (mainly the headings
+  of the 4 main chapters), and various collected advice and demos on how to
+  nicely typeset the usual material that is found in the theses, such as
+  citations, figures, tables, mathematics, cross-references, appendices, etc.
+  Various other things (table of contents, section numbering, ...) work
+  automatically and correctly by default.
 
 Because the official recommendations and requirements on the thesis form may
 change, **in case you find any serious discrepancy between the current